Over time I have started and abandoned and restarted more than a dozen firsts posts, but finished none. Meanwhile the blog sits vacant; the pixels gather dust.
Therefore this is my first post, but it’s not my first first post. When I want to write I reach for a notebook and pen; I write until I grow tired, and then I leave it alone. I generally avoid writing on computers or devices (except for correspondence), even though a majority of the daily text I read is through a screen.
Digital input, analog output.
In the accumulation of pixelated dust motes and trashed first posts, I’ve come to realize that I do not know how to write in and for this medium. I’ve come to realize that, if I’m ever going to write at all, then I need to begin writing—and thinking about writing—in a new and different way.
I’ve also come to realize that the idea of writing publicly fills me with anxiety: As soon as I imagine someone reading these words, the language itself begins to constrict thought, and ideas suffocate.
This post is long overdue, and, like any properly Derridian beginning, it is itself an originary repetition, lifted almost entirely from a prior incarnation of the project of this blog. But I am writing for myself. My goal isn’t to express anything in particular, but to merely write something into existence. My goal is rather to get it out of the way, so that I may get out of my own way, and get my words out.
American Chthonic 